We were out for a walk over the weekend and my young son found a discarded mobile phone (S3) in the bushes in the park. Battery was completely flat and noone around so we decided to take it home to charge, and see if it had some sort of "lost phone message" or something similar on the lock screen to return it (My old phone used to have this - just realized my current phone doesn't - not even sure how to do it on windows phone, though this look hopeful: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/store/apps/lock-screen-text/9wzdncrfhvqd )

Back on topic: Unfortunately it appears this phone is set to chinese or similar, since the only thing I can understand on the lock screen is "Vodafone NZ"

What's the best way to reunite the phone with owner? Just drop it at a Vodafone store and let them handle finding the owner? I'd prefer a method that's most likely to work, not just result in the phone disappearing into a lost property box to be forgotten about...

My daughter found a phone at a bus stop a couple of years ago (admittedly all the screens were in English but you could probably Google directions for how to reset the phone's screen language, unless it's locked).

She looked in the phone's call history and phoned the number that showed up the most times, with the theory that the person she called would have the "found phone" in their phone's directory so would recognise whose phone it was. She explained to that person that she had found the phone and could they contact the owner and have them phone their own mobile, which the owner did, and they arranged to meet up at a mall close to the bus stop to return the phone. She even got a small reward...